Books are my business: Founder of Fish Publishing Clem Cairns
irishexaminer.com – Sunday June 9, 2024
Clem Cairns is the founder of Fish Publishing, which he started with Jula Walton in 1994 with the aim of promoting the work of new writers.
It is based in Durrus, Co Cork, and every year publishes the Fish Anthology, featuring the winners of the Fish short story, short memoir, flash fiction and poetry prizes.
How did you get into publishing?
It is 30 years now since we founded Fish Publishing. I was trying to be a writer and there weren’t that many outlets in Ireland at that time for new writers, particularly for short fiction. Myself and my partner Jula Walton decided we would publish short Irish fiction, and we would do it by running a competition.
That was the initial idea. We called it Fish Publishing because I was working on a fishing trawler out of Schull at the time to earn the money to publish my first book of short stories. It was a good metaphor — casting out a net and hauling in the stories. We wanted to promote and encourage a new generation of Irish writers. After a few years, the internet happened and it went worldwide.
Inside Danielle Steel’s Writing Process: Needing ‘Everything Perfect to Start’ And Why She Still Gets Scared
people.com – Sunday June 9, 2024
Danielle Steel has written 212 books — so far — but the bestselling author still feels the pang of nerves before starting a new draft and the thrill of seeing the finished product on shelves when each publication day rolls around.
"It doesn't get old," she told PEOPLE, for a story in this week's print issue. "I'm always grateful. But also, I'm always scared in the beginning. I never think, 'Oh, I can do this. No big deal.' I'm always scared I won't get it right, or it won't be as good as it should be."
The author says it usually takes about 200 pages before she can really relax, and she strives to make her books "better every time."
Her writing process begins with an outlines she does by hand, accompanied by exhaustive research, much of which she does herself because that attention to detail is what makes her books credible, and keeps her readers coming back.
The surprising joys of independent publishing
thebookseller.com – Monday June 3, 2024
Publishing non-fiction is a tricky beast. I should know, I’ve written five non-fiction books to date with different publishers across the board: Ebury, Transworld, Hodder & Stoughton and each experience has been very different. While I’ve had great experiences (a Sunday Times Business Bestseller, Apple’s "best book of the month", UK book tours, guest curating at Cheltenham Literary Festival, multiple appearances at Hay Festival and other “badges of honour”) I’ve been left wondering if there might a different way to get my zeitgeist non-fiction writing out there. Non-fiction is famously hard to sell (requiring authors to have "a platform") and the books often include timely topics that rely on tapping into a cultural moment. I’ve been thinking: in a world of newsletters and zines — is publishing a traditional big hardback non-fiction book always the best way to spread your idea? I am not so sure anymore.
My Substack newsletter, The Hyphen, has really taken off over the last couple of years and has attracted over 50,000 engaged readers, meaning that I can publish my articles and essays with a click of a button, directly reaching my readers. There is a paid subscription model for any supporters of my work who want to access my hub of over 100+ articles. Even though it’s more about building the community than "scaling" financially or otherwise, I recently made the equivalent of a previous non-fiction book advance in a single month on Substack.
Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?
esquire.com – Thursday May 30, 2024
For first-time writers, it’s harder than ever to break out. That poses an existential crisis for publishing—and disturbing limits on your access to exciting new voices.
On the Road was not Jack Kerouac’s first novel, but you’d be forgiven for thinking as much.
Though 1957’s On the Road is widely considered to be Kerouac’s “debut,” the author’s first novel, The Town and the City, was in fact published in 1950. By all measures, it flopped. Between that book and the launch of On the Road, Kerouac started working with the literary agent Sterling Lord, who believed he could be the voice of his generation and laid the groundwork for his public reception as such. What, exactly, did Sterling Lord do to prime Kerouac’s audience? From 1953 to 1957, he leveraged his own professional connections to place excerpts of On the Road in magazines like The Paris Review and New World Writing, building hype for the young novelist’s next book. This is common practice today, but in the fifties, it was a novel solution to the name-recognition problem faced by unknown writers.
After a few years of seeing Kerouac’s byline in print, the thinking went, readers would pay attention when they recognized his name on the cover of On the Road. It was one of the first literary “debuts” of its kind, explains Temple University professor Laura McGrath, author of the forthcoming book Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of Contemporary American Literature. McGrath argues that Sterling Lord created the blueprint for the literary “debut” phenomenon we still see today.
How a Self-Published Book Broke ‘All the Rules’ and Became a Best Seller
nytimes.com – Thursday May 30, 2024
Keila Shaheen’s “The Shadow Work Journal” shows how radically book sales and marketing have been changed by TikTok.
Last summer, a book changed Kohn Glay’s life.
A TikTok ad had steered him to “The Shadow Work Journal,” a slim workbook that directs readers to explore hidden parts of their unconscious — their shadow selves, in the book’s vernacular. He ordered a copy, and soon was back on TikTok, fervently recommending it to his followers.
“If you’re on your spiritual journey, you absolutely need to go and get you one of these,” he says in the video, urging viewers to buy the book in the TikTok store.
The video went viral, eventually drawing more than 58 million views. Glay, who is 43 and lives in Baltimore, began holding online classes to guide people through the journal. Over the next few months, people who watched his videos bought more than 40,000 copies of the book on TikTok, and Glay earned more than $150,000 in commissions. By December, he had quit his job as a sales representative for Home Depot and now runs his own business, “Happy Healin,” which offers subscribers spiritual mentorship and coaching through Zoom sessions.
Why do books have chapters? How writing changed from antiquity to children's books and streaming
abc.net.au – Sunday May 26, 2024
Nicholas Dames remembers the first time he really got thinking about a very obvious but largely invisible writing device.
It was around two decades ago, when he was completing a PhD in English and American literature.
"A friend of mine, who was not an academic, over drinks one night, just blurted out to me, 'why do novels have chapters?'," the Columbia University humanities professor tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.
"I realised I hadn't the faintest clue how to answer that question. It was one of those, 'why is the sky blue' questions."
In the years that followed, Professor Dames returned to this question again and again, so he decided to explore the history of the chapter.
The topic may sound deeply academic, but it's not all laborious details about medieval tomes.
At the heart of this history is how we tell stories.
And from a child's development to an evening on the couch watching Netflix, the chapter affects our lives in many unnoticed ways.
Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer
lithub.com – Saturday May 25, 2024
How do you become a writer? Answer: you write.
It’s amazing how much resentment and disgust and evasion this answer can arouse. Even among writers, believe me. It is one of those Horrible Truths one would rather not face.
The most frequent evasive tactic is for the would-be writer to say, But before I have anything to say, I must get experience.
Well, yes; if you want to be a journalist. But I don’t know anything about journalism, I’m talking about fiction. And of course fiction is made out of experience, your whole life from infancy on, everything you’ve thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn’t something you go and get—it’s a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that “experience”; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing. I invite you to meditate on a pair of sisters. Emily and Charlotte. Their life experience was an isolated vicarage in a small, dreary English village, a couple of bad years at a girls’ school, another year or two in Brussels, which is surely the dullest city in all Europe, and a lot of housework. Out of that seething mass of raw, vital, brutal, gutsy Experience they made two of the greatest novels ever written: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
Our Interactions in This Business
By G. Miki Hayden
Instructor at Writer's Digest University online and private writing coach
firstwriter.com – Sunday May 19, 2024
At the heart of much of what we accomplish in this life, very much including how well we do as writers, lies how we conduct our relationships, knowingly or unknowingly.
For instance, I’m pretty sure my neighbor is annoyed with me. From time to time I’ll edit a piece of writing for him, as I did recently. I don’t charge him anything, but he will sometime thereafter take me to lunch. Generally, we’re on quite good terms, but what he sent me this last time had a tone that I didn’t think was his, and the way the material was phrased I felt was unwise. Yet the letter—that’s what the note was—made me bristle. The intent was to let a government entity know that the group requesting some action had a distinct amount of power and had better be listened to.
How sci-fi writer JG Ballard's computer poems predicted ChatGPT
bbc.com – Saturday May 11, 2024
In the 1970s, science fiction writer JG Ballard was intrigued by the growing capabilities of computers – so used one to compose poems. They were a first step on the road to ChatGPT.
The novelist and short story writer JG Ballard, is known for conjuring warped and reimagined versions of the world he occupied. Dealing with strange exaggerations of realities and often detailing the breakdown of social norms, his unconventional works are hard to categorise.
Sitting on the edge of reality, these unsettling visions often provoked controversy. Eschewing a science-fiction of the distant future, Ballard described his own work as being set in "a kind of visionary present".
Today, as we contemplate generative AI writing texts, composing music and creating art, Ballard's visionary present yet again has something prescient and fresh to tell us.
In an interview from 2004, the author Vanora Bennett suggested to Ballard that he writes about "what is just about to happen in a given community". Asked about what "kind of real-life event" inspired the ideas in his fiction Ballard responded:
I just have a feeling in my bones: there's something odd going on, and I explore that by writing a novel, by trying to find the unconscious logic that runs below the surface and looking for the hidden wiring. It's as if there are all these strange lights, and I'm looking for the wiring and the fuse box.
The topics in Ballard's fiction frequently reveal just how highly attuned he was to the subtleties of the emerging technological and social shifts that were, as he puts it, just below the surface. The fuse box of society was often rewired in his ideas.
And with generative AI there is undoubtedly something odd going on, to which Ballard's attention seems to have been drawn long before it even happened.
BookTok’s influence on publishing is set to last
ft.com – Tuesday May 7, 2024
The bursting of the pandemic sales bubble has been sharp and painful for sectors such as online retail. In publishing, an unlikely source — social media — has helped avoid a hard landing.
Social media should, in theory, be an enemy of the publishing industry given the competing pressures on consumers’ time. Since the pandemic, though, it has produced growth for once-niche genres such as fantasy and propelled authors who were little known to mainstream audiences on to bestseller lists. This will not be a fleeting phenomenon.
BookTok is a community within the video app TikTok in which influencers post content such as reviews of their favourite books. Similar groups can be found on YouTube or Instagram. Yet it is BookTok that has shaken up the sometimes fusty literary world, turbocharging sales of authors such as Sarah J Maas, Colleen Hoover and Alice Oseman among younger readers.
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